Cointel Steps Up Online Propaganda Campaign Against Assange

Talking Point:  If the US was behind the whole Swedish extradition request, as Assange states, I don’t know why we wouldn’t just extradite him directly from the UK. That would make much more sense than fabricating a criminal case in Sweden, convincing Sweden to extradite him from the UK, and then extraditing him from Sweden.

The Answer: Simply put, UK officials are trying to keep the blood of their hands on this one as much as they can. After Assange is extradited to the US from Sweden conspiracy theorists can cry all they want it was part of the plan from the beginning but it will still be relegated to conspiracy theory that isn’t part of the official story. As such the media will parrot government press releases and speculators be damned and even shunned upon. The UK avoids being officially complicit by handing Assange over to Sweden.

Such a direct extradition could even spark a revolutionary with the UK but at the least would have massive political fallout due to the politicians preventing the extradition of financial scammers, such as in the cases of Enron and the Royal Dutch Shell reserves scandal.

For example, there is at present a disagreement between the United States and the United Kingdom about the Extradition Act 2003 (text here) that dispenses with the need for a prima facie case for extradition.

This came to a head over the extradition of the Natwest Three from the UK to the U.S., for their alleged role in the Enron fraud. Several British political leaders were heavily critical of the British government’s handling of the issue.^[9] The former leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, Sir Menzies Campbell, had argued that the U.S. had not ratified the treaty primarily due to the influence of what he calls the “Irish lobby” – which, he said, is opposed to the treaty because it could make it easier for Britain to have alleged IRA terrorist suspects extradited from the U.S.

The precedent of the Natwest Three may also be used to extradite/prosecute Philip Watts in connection with the Royal Dutch Shell reserves scandal. The press has carried vocal criticisms of the present extradition arrangements from the UK’s business community, some of whom stated that they were avoiding doing business with or in the U.S. because of legal concerns such as the extradition treaty, among other concerns.^[10]

A controversy in 2012 concerns the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer from the United Kingdom to the United States.

Source: Wikipedia Entry On Extradition

Furthermore, the extradition treaty between the US and the UK  puts a wrench in the United States plans to execute Assange, most likely via means of hanging.

Soering v United Kingdom highlights the problems with the use of the Death Penalty against Assange in the case of direct extradition.

Soering v United Kingdom 11 Eur. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) (1989) is a landmark judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) which established that extradition of a young German national to the United States to face charges of capital murder violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) guaranteeing the right against inhuman and degrading treatment.^[1]

[..]

He cited article IV of the US-UK extradition treaty, which provides that an extradition request for an offence carrying the death penalty can be refused if the requesting country has not given “assurances [...] that the death penalty will not be carried out.”

Source: Wikipeda – Soering v United Kingdom

Talking Point:  Manning may be a “whistleblower,” by releasing evidence of US military wrongdoing, but he obtained said information by unauthorized (illegal) access to databases and by divulging information he was privy to in his role as a military intelligence analyst. He broke several federal laws and his own oaths. He is a criminal and will go to jail. If Assange illegally accessed secure databases or aided another, knowingly, in doing so, he is guilty of conspiracy and aiding and abetting. Even a journalist can be convicted of a crime for revealing classified information if he broke the law to obtain it. Kind of like is a WashPost reporter broke into the Pentagon, and stole the Pentagon Papers. There is a fine line between printing material someone else obtained on their own and material the reporter helped them to steal. One of those is illegal. The US government alleges  that Manning reached out to Assange for assistance in cracking encrypted passwords so he could illegally access classified information. For example wired reports:

At a preliminary hearing last December against former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, prosecutors revealed that investigators had found evidence on Manning’s computer of a chat log purportedly between Manning and Assange in which Manning allegedly asked Assange for help with cracking a password to help him obtain access to U.S. military documents.

In a chat, dated March 8, 2010, Manning asked “Nathaniel Frank,” believed to be Assange, about help in cracking the main password on his classified SIPRnet computer so that he could log on to it anonymously. He asked “Frank” if he had experience cracking IM NT hashes (presumably it’s a mistype and he meant NTLM for the Microsoft NT LAN Manager). “Frank” replied yes, that they had “rainbow tables” for doing that. Manning then sent him what looked like a hash.

If the U.S. government can prove that Assange aided Manning in cracking the password, it would be evidence of a conspiracy between the two to hack a government computer to obtain unauthorized access.

Source:Wired

What did Manning reveal that was “much worse” than an individual in a free society based on the rule of law unilaterally deciding on his own to release classified information? Oh, are you going to cherry pick single cables out of over a quarter million, such as the one showing the US was aware of girls being trafficked for sex to Afghan warlords in a society and culture that is utterly different from our own? Or are you going to count the whole of them, which shows nothing beyond the fact that the US has a thoughtful and dedicated foreign service, and actually revealed no egregious wrongdoing? Please tell me what the US has done that is so wrong that was NEW information learned from WikiLeaks, not information we already know, such as that the world is a complex place, and war is a terrible thing?

The Answer: This talking point is meant merely to conjure up the ever more irrelevant idea of American exceptionalism. If we are ever to live a peaceful world we need to put our nationalistic biases aside and look at issue from a politically neutral perspective. Without doing so we are stuck in the same trap human-kind has been trapped inside of for ages which is now more dangerous than ever since the divide and conquer technique is being used to implement a totalitarian control grid on a global scale.

First, for those who still think America is so great, this clip from HBO’s newsroom puts things in perspective – We may have been a great nation but lately we have really lost our way.

Regardless of whether you buy into that concept or not, claiming that the Wikileaks dumps didn’t reveal any shocking information we didn’t already know is a self-defeating propaganda claim that will only work on those who don’t critically think about it. If that is the case, then why is it so important to exterminate Manning and Assange along Wikileaks management, members and supporters?

The fact is even if you were to cherry pick only a single cable that shows to show the US is violating international war crimes laws then the whining about cherry-picking is trivial. We are a nation of laws and justice build upon the premise that innocent should be protected from criminals in order maintain law order. The purpose of those laws is not to allow criminals to hide in secrecy while they commit horrible crimes such as human trafficking, torture and murder.

Indeed, such crimes were uncovered by the Wikileaks dumps which also implicated other governments violating their laws to assist the United States in committing them. In times of tyranny telling the truth is treason and in such times it is the tyranny that needs to be dealt with not telling the truth.

Numerous crimes were revealed by the Wikileaks files. Crimes that no people in any age or era should allow their government to commit.

Furthermore, the claims that Assange assisted in cracking the NTLM just doesn’t pass smell test of anyone who is familiar with information security.

The reason is simply, using the term  NTLM in the first place implies you know what it is and as such that would mean that you know it is easily cracked and do no need to seek third-party assistance in cracking it. The US tries to make this scenario sound plausible by claiming that Assange, under his alias in the chat to which the US has no evidence was really Assange using that alias, responded by saying yes they use ‘Rainbow Tables’ for that.

The ‘they’ in the response does not mean ‘wikileaks’ as we are lead to believe and here’s just how ridiculous this claim is – Want to crack an NTLM hash – here’s an online form to do it! MD5Decyrptor. Alternately, you could just send the hash to the MD5bot VIA which will respond with the decrypted hash. The technically savvy will notice that NTLM relies on the easily brute forced MD5 encryption technique. In fact, it is so insecure that you are likely to find plain text that will generate a collision you can use in place of the actual password. Let me explain.

Windows XP / NTLM login process (skipping the technical jargon):

1. When you attempt to log into Windows your computer uses the password and calls a code which returns an MD5 hash of that password, which we will now refer to as MD5PasswordHash.
2. Your computer then retrieves a stored MD5 hash from a database called SAM (Security Account Manager) for that account if Md5PasswordHash matches the stored MD5 hash.
3. If it matches you get logged in, if not it prompts you to re-enter your password.

Notice that in step 2, the hash of your password is stored in the computers  SAM. Using one of many hacker tools you can easily read password hash of the Administrator accounts on the computer.

According to the government’s accusations, Manning had this NTLM password hash for the administrator and needed help cracking it. This is hogwash because if he had the hashed password to begin with, he knew about how the Windows Login works and he had a tool to retrieve that password hash.

Hacker tools that can retrieve that password hash can crack it to because doing so is merely trivial. For each test password in the set of all possible passwords check to see if the MD5 hash of that password matches the MD5 has the computer has stored for the administrator’s password.

Moreover, MD5 is so secure that odds are you may find a plain text test password that generates the same MD5 hash as the real administrator’s password. When testing all possible passwords, you are likely to find this value long before you test the administrator’s password even though it isn’t the administrator’s password. This phenomenon is called an MD5 collision and is one of the main reasons that MD5 has been declared insecure and is being phased out of use in the world of encryption.

While the ‘rainbow tables’ sound like some magical or complex thing, in essence they are really nothing more than a database of stored MD5 hashes, but instead of storing all possible values, the database stores starting points from where it can easily calculate the plain text of a hash. The link that I pointed out above simply looks up your MD5 hash from their rainbow table database. This tool onlinehashcrack.com does the same.

Try it out: Go to onlinehashcrack.com  and entire this hash (make sure there are no spaces) and crack it.

44D8FA2A1AA3A65EADFDF37AB2C94E8B

Now to claim that Manning was able to do the hard part – retrieve the hash from the computer for the administrator’s account but couldn’t crack is absurd in its own right. The tool he used to retrieve it would be able to do that. Even more absurd is if he knew what an NTLM was in the first place, then he knew just as you now know, he could just pop open a web page and crack the hash or send it to another services such as the MD5 bot on AIM.

More Talking Points

Here’s more of the same style talking points. I leave it as an exercise to my readers to compile responses to these propaganda points.

2012-08-20 19:25:00

Source: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/20/cointel-steps-online-propaganda-campaign-assange-170991/